>>PREVIEW
RADIANT CITY
DIRECTED BY Gary Burns and Jim Brown
Thursday, September 28
The Globe
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her epochal work on the state of modern city-life, Jane Jacobs refers to the French architect and city planner Le Corbusier’s notion of La Ville Radieuse ("the Radiant City," a collection of tall towers surrounded by parkland – see: the modern low-income housing project) as fulfilling "nothing but lies." While the current North American model for bettering city life flies against Le Corbusier’s ideas for densely-populated skyscrapers surrounded by greenery, Gary Burns and Jim Brown’s new film Radiant City (produced in part by the National Film Board of Canada) explores the quiet nightmares inherent in suburban growth.
"You’d have to be blind to not see there’s something going on that doesn’t look that great or maybe isn’t that functional," Burns says in a Kensington coffee house, one of Calgary’s sole neighbourhoods. "The suburbs have changed so much from when we were kids. When we were first discussing this idea, we drove out and had a coffee in McKenzie Towne and it just boggles your mind. You think it’s going to be a sterile, horrible place, but once you get there it’s like, ‘Holy fuck this is a sterile, horrible place.’"
Brown continues, "If you haven’t experienced it out there in those new developments, it’s really otherworldly. We were testing a camera very early on, and we were on this street and all of a sudden I realized that it was dead quiet. Absolutely quiet. Not only were there no people, but because there were no trees there were no birds. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation except a closed radio studio that’s been so absolutely quiet."
As a film, Radiant City trails the lives of a group of suburban dwellers – their daily routines, commutes into the city, lonely childhood afternoons and extra-curricular activities to fill the time. Focusing primarily on the busy Moss family, Burns and Brown capture the suburban ennui faced by anyone staring out at an empty cul-de-sac, the skyline punctuated by cellular towers, a downtown glowing in the distance. Given Burns’s prior body of work in particular (cue: waydowntown’s mourning over the loss of a vibrant downtown within its office towers), his involvement feels like a given, the reaction of a filmmaker moving beyond just making jokes about the absurdity of the way we currently allow ourselves to live. Brown agrees, "If you watch any of Gary’s films, they’re all about place and how the people in the place are affected by it."
Radiant City itself never gives a name to the city in which it’s set ("We purposely made this a nowhere movie. The only names we mentioned are names of communities that could be anywhere," says Brown), yet its driving concern of empty-hearted urban growth is one particularly striking for Calgary audiences. While Burns sees some slight hope in Dave Bronconnier’s recent concern over Calgary’s overwhelming sprawl (despite his prior record as "friend of the suburbs"), his views towards saving the city veer somewhat closer to the notion presented by Will Alsop at his recent Calgary lecture – of razing much of the city to the ground and starting over.
Brown concurs, "You wonder if there’s any other options for some of those communities. One of the people in our film says to look at suburban growth as first-generation construction. The difficulty is in how every downtown area started as houses, then big buildings, then skyscrapers. These suburban areas are totally hard to densify because they’re totally isolated in these pods, and there’s usually only one road in or out. It’s very hard to link them to the rest of the community. When we grew up, every street went somewhere. But in these developments, every street goes nowhere. It’s very tough to change that."
If Radiant City as a film may not entirely live up to its intentions within the documentary form, the importance of raising awareness over the suburban model is what makes Radiant City an important, of-the-moment film. Without giving away the "twist" within the film’s final act, Burns and Brown’s climactic statement on documentary filmmaking itself may indeed make an interesting point – yet it remains arguable Radiant City was the right time and place for it. Burns says, "One of our main interests was subverting the documentary form. In watching documentaries, you’re just as manipulated half of the time as with a straight drama. The idea that the documentary maker is allowing you to see everything is such a fallacy. I don’t think we’re any more manipulative than just a straight doc that’s on Passionate Eye every night."
Brown agrees, "Everyone in Radiant City lives in the suburbs, and they’re all basically talking about their own experiences. The idea is that that’s sort of cinéma vérité – maybe it’s closer to reality, but is it really closer to the truth?
Brown remains adamant that Radiant City adds a distinct voice to the rising rally forming against the evils of suburbia.
"We’re playing with the idea of reality because the suburbs really play with the idea of reality. They’re not what they appear to be. The suburbs represent a dream," Burns kicks in. "If you actually want grass in front of your house and behind your house, chances are if you haven’t got half-a-million bucks to toss out tomorrow, you’re going to live in one of these places. If you said, ‘I’ve got $300,000 and I want to buy a house,’ you can probably hold those five houses that are your options in your hands. You want a choice that’s not really there, and you aren’t living in these places because they’re just the most fabulous places. It’s because you’ve bought into the dream and that’s where you’re going to live your dream, and it’s all just a dream."
Before heading back into the Kensington sunshine, Brown outlines their intentions simply. "We want to contribute to that sort of critical mass. We want to give people something interesting to talk about after they see the film. We want people to realize that we can do way better than we are when it comes to building places to live in." |
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